There was much to rave about as Art Basel's flagship Swiss fair returned to Basel. While not the fast-paced hustle we're used to, galleries spoke of strong sales, signalling a gentler realignment of a market that had become overheated.
On day one, Hauser & Wirth placed all three landmark Louise Bourgeois works, including Spider IV (1996) for US $22.5 million, and a Personages sculpture for US $7.5 million. The rest of the booth met similar success with major works by Jack Whitten, George Condo, Mark Bradford and Barbara Chase-Riboud all fetching seven figures.
Gladstone Gallery had one of our favourite booths, an exquisite Victor Man portrait, a top-tier Alighiero Boetti biro work, and two Richard Prince cowboy photographs. Four works passed the million dollar mark: a Keith Haring ink on poster board, an Alex Katz painting, an Elizabeth Peyton painting, and a collage by Robert Rauschenberg, who's currently the focus of a solo exhibition, Spreads and Scales (3 May–17 June 2023), at the gallery's 21st Street location in New York.
David Zwirner's large (and beautiful) Agnes Martin canvas sold for $5 million, while their smaller Gerhard Richter Abstraktes Bild painting sold for $5.5 million.
Although Thaddaeus Ropac sold three Georg Baselitz paintings, an ink, and a further five drawings, it seemed their pièce de résistance, Spekulatius (1965), was still up for grabs as the day one drew to a close.
Over at Unlimited, Ropac ramped up the fervour for Martha Jungwirth works by showcasing her monumental oil painting Memorial II (Triptychon) (2021), which measures nearly nine metres long. They sold four works by the Austrian artist including the pictured Untitled (2020) for €360,000 (US 390,000).
